Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

Should I tell the whole truth?

I love the people I love

because they're full of illusions about life.

The only promise of life is death.

When I am with living people, I see how they'll be when they're dead.

I don't see them, but I know.

Am I sad? Frankly, no.

No one is more thankful to life than me.

DON'T RELEASE ME, I CAN DO IT BY MYSELF

17 years.

It was complete solitude.

When I say solitude, I mean it.

It was a cube of concrete.

Nine square meters.

Usually, you can't see the sky. You see nothing.

You're locked in a concrete cube for 17 years.

Without...

It took me about

16 years to get used to it.

It was empty.

I mean empty

because it was empty like a monk's cell.

I mean it.

Anything that could distract me

from what I had to do

was a sin to me.

What could matter more than getting my freedom back?

Reading a book?

Listening to a radio show?

No.

I wouldn't exchange my freedom for that.

I wanted to keep my pain intact.

I stayed for years in emptiness and solitude without speaking

because I actually didn't see anyone.

I wouldn't talk to the guards.

They were there to lock me up

and maybe more.

Listen,

this is called silence. 17 years.

You think.

You learn stuff through what's missing.

Something's missing.

I don't mean coffee or some crap like that.

That's nothing.

You miss things like merely touching someone.

You see?

You only have the cold walls. You stay like that for years.

You learn what's missing.

You learn to go back to the basics.

The things that we erase in our daily lives,

because of habit.

When you don't have them, you know they're missing.

When you don't have them

for months, for years and years and years.

That's how I learned things. By missing them.

It shapes you well.

Michel Vaujour on trial...

Michel Vaujour was not an ordinary inmate.

A helicopter for Michel Vaujour.

He shouldn't be released before 2015.

Jamila and I got married

in 1999.

There was no way I would be released.

In theory, I was still in for 20 years.

I started doing it as I would have prepared a jailbreak.

I studied law in depth, especially a new law.

It said that the decision to release someone

wasn't up to a random administrative body anymore,

but was up to the judges.

They had to justify refusing or accepting a request.

It means you had to fit a profile.

I did my best to meet the requirements to fit the profile.

In such a game, there is so much adversity that you cannot lie.

What was the most difficult for you

from the moment you started to work on your release?

The most difficult think was to stop escaping.

My brain was made for that.

I thought about it for 20 years, day and night.

I had to stop overnight.

To being 20!

I was in solitary confinement for my 20th birthday.

- I'm sure you love this. - I do.

It's been a while, right?

For me too.

When Michel was placed in the care of his Aunt Germaine,

what did you think, Lisa?

When he went to his aunt's?

- It must have been difficult. - It was.

It was difficult but I was glad. I knew he'd be fine.

But with me he...

He'd bang his head against the walls.

I don't know if you remember.

Nothing.

Fortunately, I don't have a lot of memories.

One time, it was so violent I even called the doctor.

I was scared.

What did I do?

Like a kid.

Then you were grumpy because you couldn't open the door.

Back then, it wasn't like now.

You entered through the window.

- Why? - To enter!

You must have been five or six.

So he was with his aunt not far from here.

When did you see him?

We were in Vertus.

He was in Reims.

- In Reims? - Yes.

VERTUS, THE VILLAGE OF HIS CHILDHOOD

My parents gave me away because of that.

What a disaster.

Already as a kid.

Did you feel it was unfair when they gave you away?

I know it's weird, but that time is erased.

It's funny, right? And still...

I only have a few dots of memories.

I know that at my aunt's we ate margarine toasts.

And my cousins.

I remember a few dots here and there.

I have almost no memories.

It's almost as if they had been erased.

Not really.

When I was released, before coming here,

I would call my mother every day.

She'd say: "Are you sure you're okay?"

She thought I'd do it again.

Don't worry, I'm okay.

One day, we talked about my aunt.

My mother said, talking about her, that she was like a second mother.

When she said that,

something from deep inside came out:

"No, your first mother."

And I snapped.

It's weird.

How was Michel as a kid?

He loved nature.

He had a hawk.

He had plenty of pets everywhere.

He even had a crow or a magpie. No, it was a crow.

I had a magpie, a crow, a hawk... Everything.

He raises them by himself and he took good care of them.

He wasn't mean at all.

When you love animals, you can't be bad.

- But who knows? - Yes, who knows.

You said you didn't talk about Michel when he was in jail.

No.

Nobody ever talked about Michel.

First, there wasn't much to say.

He was in jail.

I think that people and me too

felt somehow guilty, but not exactly that.

We wouldn't go see him even though he was alone in his cell.

Everybody thought like me, that's why we didn't mention it.

Otherwise we would have said: "You never go to see him."

Or something like that.

Not talking about it made things easier.

It's true.

During all those years, I never shed a tear.

Not even one. I don't know how to cry.

I don't know how. It sounds silly, right?

In jail people only talked about jail. But you couldn't with me.

You are in prison. Why would you talk about it?

When you're in shit, you won't talk to me about how it smells.

When I was in jail, I didn't think in jail terms.

I did my best not to have a prison routine.

A guard says this and does that.

He presses a button and you raise your hand.

You're like a puppet.

I did things normally, with indifference, my goal in mind.

It was always the same, like with my jailbreaks.

I had a good mental hygiene.

I shouldn't think about jail.

I should put good things in my mind.

The day you care more about your enemy, you're done for.

He's won.

You see? Even if you're ready to die to kill him.

Do you feel like being reborn or like being born?

You'd be a beautiful baby.

Thank you, cousin.

A beautiful baby.

I'm really being born. It's not a stupid idea at all.

I feel I have no past. It's weird.

You keep the good things and you move forward.

If you keep the bad things inside,

they will screw you, that's all.

That's the mistake I did during the first period.

- Haven't you heard the ducks? - No.

I can hear them well.

- What is this? - Not chicks, that's for sure.

You know what fascinated me?

It's all the life behind the things you can't see.

It just...

I knew that if I wanted to go back to a normal life,

I would have to be a normal man.

To me, a normal man

is what I call a human being.

You were not one before?

I tried hard not to be one.

This isn't good.

It can be seen from afar.

In the neighborhood, everybody loved Michel.

Why? Because there were no thugs in the neighborhood.

We were the thugs.

He loved to disrespect the tough guys,

those who earned respect with their fists.

He liked to give them a trashing.

"Everybody's scared of you? Come here.

"I'm going to kick your ass."

You loved that. I remember the words you used.

You pissed them off so much.

They were about to lose it right away.

You just had to go get them.

Yes, I loved that.

- I always loved... - Direct confrontation.

Square things.

Let me explain.

While we were wearing jeans and biker leather jackets,

Michel had style.

He wore a suit with a tie.

Fancy clothes. So stylish.

You can't deny you had fancy clothes.

- I liked that back then. - You loved it.

I liked the fact that with or without fancy clothes,

it was the same for him:

"You want a piece of me ? Come here."

And that was it.

After 10 P.M, all was dead.

We were 17 and we wanted to get our butts in gear.

I would steal cars to make the cops come to have fun

and lose them if possible.

Sometimes, there were car crashes. It was a riot.

We were very bad drivers. We didn't know how to drive.

He stole cars but he couldn't drive them.

Asshole.

At first.

It's true somehow, though.

We wanted to get rid of boredom,

to get rid of the nonsense.

There was nothing.

We wanted to break the chain of events that was taking you

to work at the factory.

We wanted to avoid the path our fathers took.

My father and my mother were civil servants their whole lives.

They obeyed society's authority a lot.

I was the opposite.

I refused being subservient to society.

I think a life's secret

can often be summed up as a child's heartache.

What would you have needed not to go over to the dark side?

The problem was my relationship with my father.

One day, we broke a vase.

As always, he thought it was me.

I remember he tried to hit me.

He twisted my hand so that I'd kneel and apologize.

I never did anything of the sort.

That's me. I never gave in to anyone.

You first went to jail because of a car theft,

what you call a loan.

- You'd put them back. - Yes.

The sentence was very heavy:

you were sentenced to 30 months in jail and banned for five years.

I had never gone out of the department

except to go to Paris for demonstrations.

I had never gone out of the department

except when Zabette drove us sometimes, but it was never far.

I ended up in jail for 30 months.

It was bad, very bad,

since it was my first heartbreak.

Do you feel that if the police hadn't busted you,

you would have led the life you lead?

It completely cured me from...

If I hadn't been busted and if the she hadn't betrayed me

with a cop to add insult to injury,

and if I hadn't spent 30 very harsh months in jail,

my life could have been different.

I wasn't worse

than all the local guys I hung out with.

Today, they have normal lives and had normal journeys.

It didn't keep them

from doing one burglary or two, things like that,

but it never got as big as with me.

I would have gone home.

In time, as should be,

I would have married a local girl

and I would have ended up leading a quiet life.

What did your first time in jail teach you?

It had gotten to the point when I thought of it as Harvard.

I thought: "I have two years left in here.

"I will meet the people I need during these two years."

I merely thought

that when released, I'd have all the diplomas I'd ever need.

It was like studying.

I had an ideal vision of what a bandit was.

To me 'prison' was the same as Harvard.

That's what I thought in my immature mind.

To me, justice didn't exist.

To me, it was a big sham.

You have those people who lead and those poor people under.

I was among the poor people, those people without any power.

I was the son of a nobody.

After you first time in jail, you bought a car.

You wanted to see Zabette who betrayed you,

except the car broke down.

The only car that came was a police car.

They asked me for the car papers.

You weren't lucky.

Not at all.

I didn't have a driving license.

I didn't have insurance.

Just by seeing the cops,

just by seeing their uniform...

One bitten, twice shy.

I had done time once...

The weather was too nice.

Even if it had rained, I had just spent 30 months in jail.

I didn't want to lose my summer

for a mere driving license.

In my head, with my experience of police and of justice,

I didn't want to stay there.

I fled running in the fields.

I jumped in the Saône River.

I swam and swam.

There were signs on the bank.

They called reinforcements.

Before I was on the other side,

there were already plenty of gendarme trucks there.

They put me in Mâcon prison.

I escaped.

It was a simple jailbreak.

I spotted something at the beginning.

It was a simple jailbreak, out of sheer cunning.

I disappeared.

I came back to the only place I knew,

around here, in Marne.

One evening, we did a small burglary.

I needed money, I was in hiding.

We did a small burglary but could take nothing.

I had seen 'Farewell, Friend', with Alain Delon.

There was a chest in the small factory we entered.

I spend at least two hours in front of it, doing as in the movie.

I was a kid.

We left and 48 hours later I got arrested.

I got arrested and ended up in Chalons prison.

To manage to get out of a prison and of all it represented

was truly exhilarating.

There was something

truly exhilarating to me,

to the young exhilarated guy I was.

There was something exhilarating, yes.

I knew

that whatever happened, I'd escape again.

Escaping was my part.

To me, prison meant escaping.

It was what it was meant to be.

Once I told someone, I can't remember who,

that I wouldn't been surprised

if I had opened a dictionary to see that prison meant:

"place where you escape from."

That was me.

You got arrested one month after your jailbreak.

During this new detention time,

you met Gilles, the brother of Nadine,

the woman you eventually married.

How was he your brother in arms?

We were the same.

He was a handyman.

He liked to rigs thing up.

He was a housebreaker.

I met him the first time I was on the run.

He opened his sports bag.

Inside

there was a small-caliber gun.

I had never seen a real gun, except the policemen's.

There was also a sawed-off gun,

a wig, and some other stuff.

He told me:

"Have you ever robbed someone?"

I can't forget about it.

I said yes.

I could have said no.

It was the first time I saw something organized.

Yes.

The world is a small place and we ended up together.

We went for it together.

He didn't want to escape.

He only had a few months left to do.

We were in the same cell.

We did everything together.

How did you escape?

Give me a pencil.

2.5 by 2.5.

This is the cell's key.

How can you say it's 2.5? You never touched the key.

I did.

How did you do that?

For months, I went around with some wax in my hand.

I wanted to get one of the keys' imprint,

the cell's key and of the promenade's key.

The guards walked holding the bunch of keys.

You must identify the key to the cell.

When the guard opens the door, you take a peek,

two, three, four, five, six times.

In the end, the shape gets imprinted in your mind.

You can spot it right away in the bunch.

Then you jostle the guard as a pickpocket would do.

You jostle the guard.

The key.

Then you quickly go back to your cell

because the wax loses its shape quickly under the heat.

You put in the box and you make measurements.

It's a lot of work.

It took me weeks to get something like that.

You have an idea, you work on it.

You must find how to get the key.

That's the right question.

How to get the key.

MAY 1974

You got arrested one month after your jailbreak.

I'd like us to talk about your friendship

with Gilles.

You said back then

that you were rather rebellious anarchists than gangsters.

What's the difference?

To me a gangster is almost part of the system.

A gangster is too much like a cop.

It may sound strange.

Gangsters were too close to the system.

I was completely out of the system.

In the unfulfilled dreams of your childhood,

you were missing a brother.

It always was...

I think I've told you.

He was the brother I never had.

A brother who took you closer to that world,

in terms of fraternity, of crime...

- And of family. - Yes.

The life I'm building right now excepted,

they were my only real family.

A family where ties

had some real value,

where I knew who was who and that we had each other's back,

and where we were one, because that's a family to me.

That's where my only real family was.

From nice little jailbreaks

to small accumulated offenses,

I ended up with a 25-year prison sentence.

I had never used a weapon.

I had never hurt anybody.

It was a lot.

Of course, prison wardens didn't like to see me arrive

since I escaped all the time.

I ended up in solitary confinement.

I understood I had a problem

because escaping wasn't the same at all.

How old were you when you were first confined?

I was 24.

You discover the cell.

It's a concrete cube.

It's yellow from floor to ceiling.

That yellow doesn't absorb the light, it reflects it.

That was the first evening.

You wait until the light goes off to sleep.

But it doesn't.

It stays on all night.

It will never go off.

The mosquitoes come in.

You can never really sleep.

I could never really sleep even when I was tired.

The most significant things

were solitude, silence, and the stillness of all things.

Nothing moves around you.

Only one thing moves around you: the guards.

When did you...?

lose my innocence for good?

Was it then or was it later?

Back then, I realized how much in trouble I was.

I had to do 25 years in jail because I played too much

in the detentions condition I've just described, with the solitude,

the impossibility to escape,

and solitude.

When you realize that, prison becomes very heavy.

You cannot escape.

If you have a tiny opportunity, you work on it.

For one, two years. It doesn't matter.

But there was nothing.

I thought about everything I could in that cell.

With what I had at my disposal, there was nothing.

You understand you're in trouble.

You start wondering.

Is that when you lost your innocence?

No, it was later, as time went by.

When you decide

that you want to die too much.

You want to die because it's too much.

You can't be reduced to this.

Your life can't be reduced to this. You don't deserve it.

That's what I felt.

You don't think about it just like that.

It's there all the time. It's in the weight of every moment.

It's in every moment, in the meaninglessness of days.

You have as much life as a fly in a closed jar.

You have about as much life,

except the fly has more space, proportionally.

I think I would have offed myself.

It was well underway.

Then I realized that if I had to die,

at least I'd die standing trying to get my life back.

Do you understand?

I had enough time to understand.

Accepting death

was the only strength I could muster to turn things around.

I would face the wall.

There was a small dot on the wall,

with some light mark in the middle.

As Master Deshimaru puts it,

I entered my coffin.

I became as emotional

as a soldier on duty.

Really.

It was a daily exercise.

It was a cleanse that yoga brought me.

I used yoga as a tool back then.

I couldn't be hurt.

I had removed everything from myself.

I couldn't be deprived of anything since I needed nothing.

I had to be immobile all the time.

When I say immobile, I mean on the inside.

You see? They shouldn't have any grip on me.

You cannot imagine the grip they have

when you have to face five people.

You see only them for years and they are your masters in uniform.

They are the unchallenged rulers of a place without rights.

I became a weapon. I built the weapon I didn't have.

I had become a real predator.

Really.

It's as I said before.

I was a man that could be deemed dangerous.

I lived in a truth I had built in myself day by day.

To me, it was clear the world was very harsh.

I had become as hard as what I had been surrounded with for years.

I had become much harder.

When you mother and your sister visited you,

you could size up the rift.

Yes.

At some point, you asked them not to come anymore

because somehow...

I was afraid.

You said it threatened your own project.

It did.

When I saw them,

they were like aliens.

I'm not kidding.

They were aliens telling me about the simple things in life.

They did it to me,

a man who would look at a dot on the wall for hours,

going down to the deepest parts of his self.

They told me about

the Christmas parcel they brought me.

Berthe told me about something we ate

for lunch.

Salt pork.

She told me about the things in the parcel,

the pancakes I liked and things like that.

To me, it was completely surreal.

You see?

The food they brought me

was a wound to my heart.

There is something in the food you prepare yourself.

It's not as if you're brought canned food.

People who love you cook for you,

and bring it to you when you're there,

seasoning it with love.

Love wasn't something I got on a daily basis.

If you meet a rat in a hallway

that is fleeing from something,

and that it does have space to pass on your right or on your left,

it stops and looks at you.

That rat

will bite you in order to pass.

If you let it pass,

it will pass.

The first law is the law of survival.

It supersedes all the laws of society.

When you're dying in a hole like a dog,

you don't give a rat's ass about all the laws.

I had started thinking about my jailbreak for years.

I had been preparing it for years.

Every time I went to court,

things got nearer.

Every time.

I had trained for a long time

when they searched me to go to court.

The guards always went to the same spots.

One, two, three like that. I was in the middle.

I undressed and I looked at my clothes.

I put so much distance that they didn't dare insisting.

I had hidden a weapon in my underwear's false bottom.

They were supposed to feel my underwear.

They usually didn't do it, in my case even less.

I undressed.

I had only taken my underwear's elastic bands.

If I pulled it down in a really specific and precise way,

it'd take a bell shape on my thighs.

The weapon was in the hollow of the bell.

I had a guard here and a guard there.

I turned on myself.

I pivoted so that they could see everything

and I pulled my underwear up.

As I did it, my back was facing the place where there was no one.

It was a dance

I had practiced hundreds of times in my cell at night

with my fake underwear.

That very precise movement was a choreography.

That's what it was.

It was a very precise choreography.

I went up there like that.

I took it out in the waiting room.

I put it there.

I left to the court of justice.

In my escort, there was always a guy.

He was a sniper.

I knew he'd cause trouble for me.

He was always there and I could see what kind of person he was.

I would test him every time.

During my previous time to court...

I tested him all the time to see

what he was made of.

During my previous time to court we were waiting to leave.

When they heard the car coming to pick them up,

he said to his colleague,

and I know I'm digressing:

"Here comes the coach."

I allowed myself to smile.

He looked at me and said: "Is the coach funny?"

And I said: "No, the drivers are."

He didn't like my joke, but he went no further.

I knew there'd a surprise in store for him the next time.

And he got it.

I usually didn't stay long in court,

but that time, I had to stay until the night.

I started answering the questions I was asked.

I said mostly rubbish, but some things were true too.

I didn't care.

At some point, the judge showed me a map.

I got up, rolled under the desk and took the weapon out.

The exit door was there.

There was a cop in front of me.

I called him "moustache". He was the troublesome one.

He took his weapon out looking at me in the eyes.

He said: "You won't leave this place alive, Mr. Vaujour."

I said: "Don't move, asshole."

He stood to attention.

I thought he had something to do with the court clerk.

Maybe they were relatives.

I said: "If you move, I will shoot her right away."

He lowered his weapon.

I made it clear they'd get me.

I said: "I go out, I go to the door,

"and then the hunt begins."

The judge's bag was there.

The key to the door was in the bag, I saw it before.

When I got to the door, I asked the judge to take the bag

and to take the little white key out.

I locked them in.

Three jailbreaks and three arrests:

Michel Vaujour has escaped once again,

this time from the Chalons court of justice.

For more an hour, before escaping, he held the judge hostage.

He had been sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1976 for theft.

Jean-Claude Perpère.

He escaped from the Chalons court of justice

where he was being heard for a whole series of armed robberies.

His escape was in Mesrine's style.

After an-hour-long questioning, he asked to go to the bathroom

where an accomplice had hidden a gun.

With his weapon, he took the judge, Ms. Blink, hostage.

She tried to reason with him for an hour.

They couldn't realize it wasn't a gun?

It looked good enough?

You cannot imagine.

It was not good enough

because it started getting broken in the court of justice.

Since it was soap it was slippery, right ?

I had added some icing on the cake.

I made a bolt.

I had made it using a battery.

It gave it a metallic feel.

You know, the round batteries.

The bolt had a mechanic feel.

I had also made a hammer for the sound.

The hammer

was a nail clipper.

I put it together

using some can sliver that went like this.

Ten minutes before, I asked to go the bathroom.

I just went there to pee.

I locked myself in and they pushed the door behind me.

In their heads, automatically,

they thought I had gotten the weapon there.

The usual stuff.

Back then, Jacques Mesrine had just escaped like that.

He went to the bathroom to get some weapons.

To a cop, one plus one means two all the time.

It gave credibility to my weapon.

When I escaped, I really thought I had won.

I understood much later

that I had actually lost something essential:

my ability to feel joy.

I had gotten my freedom back

but it wasn't really joyful.

I didn't know how to love.

Going back to civilian life wasn't difficult.

You got used to it quickly.

Yes, I got used to it quickly.

It was much easier to adapt to freedom than to prison.

Freedom gets to you really quickly.

Plus,

you're in the action.

I was to a point where it was a job to me.

It wasn't a choice since I couldn't go back.

It was the first time you really owned a weapon.

You met Gilles and you planned armed robberies together.

I could be Gilles' hand and eyes.

He was my hand and eyes.

When my eyes couldn't see and my hand couldn't do,

he was there.

When his eyes couldn't see and his hand couldn't do, I was there.

DURING HIS THREE YEARS ON THE RUN,

MICHEL, AS A GANG LEADER, WENT FROM ONE ARM ROBBERY TO THE NEXT.

I wonder how you could survive for so long under such conditions.

You can't lose.

- It wasn't possible. - You can't lose.

You can't.

What looks crazy to you?

That he managed to do it without hanging himself.

I saw many people who didn't go through what he did

that ended up hanging from the bars of their cells.

When were you supposed to be released?

I felt it was like a science-fiction movie title.

To me, it wasn't possible.

It was dying step by step.

Every day, one second, one minutes, one hour, one day.

It was hell.

I don't think people who have never been to prison for a while

can understand what it is.

I think you can tell Michel's story in three episodes.

Before solitary confinement

he was a nice and decent guy.

He liked to fight, but he was nice.

During and after solitary confinement

he was not the same at all.

He was violent, but his violence had a purpose.

I felt he was dangerous.

I can even say he made me nervous.

I could feel...

..he wouldn't be caught.

If he had a chance to take his weapon out to defend himself,

he would risk it all and let the chips fall.

That was true for himself as for the others.

So he was dangerous.

He absolutely didn't want to go back there.

Do you remember?

Even while I was on the run,

sometimes

I felt there was no meaning.

I needed some meaning to live.

When you had a life

like the one I had all those years,

you need a meaning to make the pain worth it.

When I say pain, I really mean it.

It had to be worth the pain.

Sometimes, during those years when I had it all

materially speaking,

something was missing.

Maybe

the only thing that really moved me was death.

It was the challenge of death.

Sometimes, when the emptiness was too strong,

I would leave.

Sometimes, I would even provoke situations

that were extremely borderline.

I could have been killed easily.

I loved those times.

I actually felt all powerful.

It was never enough anyway.

It wasn't for the money. It wasn't for the money anymore.

It was for my taste for it.

One of the most satisfying things

was not to count the money.

It was to plan the action.

What is a robbery?

A robbery is, all of a sudden...

Everything is normal in the city.

All of a sudden,

you become the master of that small space

for a determined duration.

It means controlling things completely.

That's what a robbery is.

When you did an armed robbery and held innocents hostage,

you knew you could have been threatening your mother's life

who could have entered the bank.

I wouldn't have hurt a woman entering the bank.

No, but you had no idea how she would react.

You didn't know

whether she could get panicked and have a heart attack.

Did you think about that?

Not the heart attack.

I wouldn't hurt someone who didn't threaten my life.

I feel such deaths would weigh on your conscience.

I know such things today.

Back then, I didn't because it was the norm to me.

For instance,

during a robbery

a policeman got shot in the head.

I'll give it to you in a nutshell.

It had gone smoothly and we had left.

The guy with me,

Norauto,

forgot one of the bags with the money on the parking lot.

We went back and got it on the parking lot.

Nobody had touched it and we left with it.

Of course, when we arrived on the road,

which was our escape route,

we passed a cop car.

They tried to get in our way.

I accelerated.

As I did, I heard gun shots.

We scampered.

When I arrived at our hiding place,

I told the other: "Fuck, that was close."

He said: "No, it was me."

I didn't know. It wasn't even needed.

We didn't need it, I had passed them.

Much later, when I got arrested, they blamed me for it.

I said it was the policeman not the man that got injured.

I said it was the policeman.

I couldn't see the people behind the function.

It was the same with the guards.

With the guards it was worse.

I had very abstract representations.

There was the uniform

and I didn't know what was next.

It's easy to get addicted to power

when you realize what you can do.

It's easy to take a liking to it,

to the euphoria.

Was it difficult for you to give that power up?

It was a work that happened using the same rules

that trained me

to being efficient

and thus

to the feeling of power that stems from it.

That was the corner stone.

SEPTEMBER 1981

MICHEL WAS ARRESTED AGAIN. TO LOWER HIS CHANCES OF ESCAPING,

HE WAS TRANSFERED FROM PRISON TO PRISON EVERY THREE MONTHS.

Dear parents, you must be on vacation.

I ate beef with fries for lunch.

I hope you'll write to me, dad. Thanks in advance, dear father.

I hope you had a nice vacation.

A few words to give you some news.

I spit on society and on the rest of the world.

Dear Chantal, say hi to our parents and to Claudine and Bébèque.

Even though they scarcely write, I guess they're not dead.

You can't measure my resentment.

Say hi to Father Hello.

Tell him I wasn't made to live in a city.

I write a few lines to answer your letter.

I write a few words on this wet Sunday.

I need no words or outward signs

to know a mother loves his son.

I want to live in nature so much, far from the cold cities.

I leave you giving you big hugs.

Your son, Michel.

My biggest connection is to Michel.

Of course, even if it's violent.

I almost visited all the prisons of France.

I went there every Sunday and Saturday.

Daniel and I visited you every Saturday.

I saw nobody else from my family, except my mother sometimes.

With Chantal, there was continuity.

Chantal had always been here for me.

It hurt the most when he was in Clermont.

The first year.

He was on hunger strike.

They had attached things to your feet when you came to see me.

- The chains. - Yes, to the feet.

You couldn't stand anymore. Two guards brought you.

Yes, I remember the chains.

You remember?

Yes, at the parlor I had chains.

One time, they took me to the parlor like that.

I was isolated because I was on a hunger strike.

I remember she was behind the window.

In the parlor,

there were windows overlooking the courtyard I was passing through.

She looked at me from there and she was screaming.

That was my daily life.

When you go out of there, it is gut wrenching.

When you see your brother being held by two guards,

unable to walk and on hunger strike,

you want to kill everyone.

I'm telling you, you want to kill everyone.

With the chains, you want to kill them even more.

Sometimes, I thought I would never touch a tree again.

It sounds stupid, I know.

I lived in concrete, only in concrete.

In solitary confinement, whenever a blade of grass grows...

There is always dust and the strength of plants is dreadful.

- The dust piles up. - It grows everywhere.

The dust piles up in the corners of the walls.

Some grass starts to grow.

As soon as it grows, the guards came to cut it.

They removed everything.

There were flowers growing in the cell.

I'm not kidding.

I went out in the morning with a wet rag in my pocket.

I gave them water.

I went to the yard and gave them water.

When I arrived, they were gone.

I don't like to talk about it.

How did your father justify not going to see Michel in prison?

He couldn't.

- Why? - I don't know.

How many times did mom come to see you in prison?

The fact he never came to see me hurt me.

I didn't exist anymore.

- To him, it was a shame. - No it wasn't.

It was about what people thought.

He was a civil servant in the administration,

where there was such prattle:

"You know, having a son like that..."

Dad was what he was, but he was honest.

That's bullshit. I saw him steal meat my whole life.

That's nothing. It's normal.

In that case, what I did is nothing either.

It's true that mom had a child, a son that she lost.

Then she had my sister Nicole, then me.

- I had a dead brother? - Yes, Bertrand.

I didn't remember.

You never knew.

Maybe I knew.

It's strange.

I told mom about it sometimes and she couldn't remember.

It's strange sometimes.

I must have heard about it as a kid. It's very strange.

In our family, we're skilled at keeping secrets.

You liked the priest.

He always paid visits to the priest.

Odile and you.

You were happy and you believed.

He believed in Santa Claus.

This was when you got released, right?

You had beautiful hair.

- They're long. - They were still beautiful.

Look how beautiful you were for your communion.

Actually, that wasn't you, it was your father.

This is you too.

Probably in school.

- What school? - No idea.

- I'm sure it was in prison. - Probably.

I'm sure.

You were easily 18, if not more.

- Your hair is cut here. - Yes.

Where was it?

- In prison. - Really?

It looks nice.

You should stay there for 20 years.

Of course.

- This was gymnastics? - Somehow.

For sure!

With Michel's each escape,

you ended up with, as you say, the cops right on your ass.

Yes.

- They came to check each time? - Yes, each time.

Were you worried about him?

Yes, I was worried about him

because of what could happen to him.

I was quite scared, yes.

It's sad, but I was happy whenever they caught him.

It's a sad thing to say.

I shouldn't have said it?

You see what I fled from?

I understand.

Chantal told me the other time

that I had a brother.

Is she insane?

Wait, yes. The first I got died as I gave birth to him.

Yes.

He would be more than 60 too.

It's true, I remember.

I couldn't remember.

You weren't born.

When she said it, I knew it was true.

Yes.

I must have heard about it as a kid.

JULY 1983

Gilles died in an armed robbery

that was meant to fund the jailbreak.

His sister was the pilot.

My wife.

He wanted the job to be clean.

He decided to do an armed robbery

to get money for after the jailbreak

so that everything would be easy and we would have everything.

For 20 days, we didn't know whether he was dead,

whether he was among the dead or the living.

Back then, the atmosphere was as follows.

Saying nothing for 20 days to a mother or a sister is a big deal.

Or to a friend.

He was dead, maybe roasted.

We didn't know whether he was dead or alive.

That place where joy was,

where things were supposed to work out, it was a slaughter.

To some extent,

it quickened the La Santé prison operation.

It quickened it. It had to be done right away

so that I could be free right away

to get his body at the morgue.

We wanted to bury him by ourselves.

Back then, Nadine was too much in an emotional shock.

Piloting was dangerous.

On site, it had to be very accurate.

She was stressed out.

It would have been a disaster.

Still, that's what they asked me to do.

- You wanted to get his body? - Yes.

We wanted to take him and bury him.

You understand?

Then we'd have all disappeared.

It didn't happen.

I saw his body in the news.

I saw a body but I didn't know it was him. I knew later.

He was in the middle of the road, all curled up and burnt.

He was almost a piece of charcoal.

His shoes were...

I couldn't stop

what I had started.

My closest friend had died to help me do it.

And I was supposed to give up fighting

and sit on my hands?

It would have been a betrayal. I simply couldn't do it.

He mustn't be dead for nothing.

- You never visit his grave? - No.

The death of those who love

leads to small deaths inside of you.

In the end, Gilles died

to save me.

To me, it wasn't normal I was still alive.

It didn't matter when you gave up fighting?

No.

Only one thing mattered in that case.

Meaning.

MAY 1986

A prisoner from La Santé Prison escaped by helicopter.

Spectacular jailbreak this morning in the middle of Paris.

Michel Vaujour escaped by helicopter.

A 34-year-old prisoner escaped through the air

in the middle of Paris.

As in a movie, a prisoner spectacularly escaped

from La Santé Prison.

He had been sentenced to 10 years in prison.

You cannot dream about Zorro and Arsène Lupin's feats

without being amazed by the spectacular jailbreak

that occurred in La Santé Prison.

It was a movie because nothing was missing:

a helicopter, the prison's roof,

and even a woman who led the operation.

The operation had been planned in a pure American blockbuster way:

fake license plates,

a pilot who severed all communication with the police...

With the aircraft hovering above the prison,

only one of the two men grabbed its skids.

Michel Vaujour was free.

Nadine, his wife, was the pilot of the Alouette Two.

Michel Vaujour left the prison by air,

under the cheers of the other inmates.

The helicopter escape symbolized the failure

of all the guys I believed in considering the values of the time.

They all copped out.

In the end,

it was a woman

whom I had sometimes neglected for these friendships

which I found were more important

who took over what these men were supposed to do.

It was supposed to be unexpected and fast.

It had to be efficient, especially psychologically, even for Nadine.

This is a blind spot.

All this is a blind spot.

The aircraft was always in the blind spot.

That was the idea.

All was supposed to happen in the blind spot where I was.

I was supposed to climb up here and get rid of the guard.

There was a building there.

A female friend entered the building.

She came down.

She called from a public phone next to the heliport

where Nadine was waiting with a friend.

She said: "He's here."

It was in case I had been moved.

She went back up.

She stuck a piece of paper.

The red piece of paper meant that they were on their way.

The helicopter arrived.

It launched a call.

Suddenly, it disappeared from the radars.

It was troublesome.

We had to give a reason why it disappeared.

We needed no more than three minutes.

When Nadine threw the bag...

It was really specific stuff,

with a really precise organization in the bag.

The bag shouldn't be opened. With zippers, you never know.

It was closed with two big rubber bands.

I knew the first thing in it was the weapon.

There were inmates around me.

They were not all my friends.

I spun round with the weapon in my hand.

The guard clung to the wall and the others went out of my way.

How did I climb to the roof? With a telescopic stick.

I opened it and took it out.

I climbed up.

My friend gave me his hand.

I took it, sat on the skid and we left.

I had the weapon in my mouth.

I was climbing up with the gun in my mouth.

I threw it in the yard.

The guy in the helicopter did the same.

They were both fake.

It was enough. It looked like a military operation.

But there were no weapons.

We had determined we'd use fake weapons

so that her offense would be minimal.

She shouldn't have ended up in the dead-end I was in.

It had to be light.

How did Nadine prepare?

Nadine belonged to our world.

She had never taken part in an operation, obviously.

It was an atmosphere.

We were a family.

We really were a family, with Lina,

Gilles, Nadine, and me.

Gilles died

trying to get me out, so that I could be out.

Does what you're saying explain that still today,

20 to 30 years later, you are still much moved?

He was my friend.

It looks as if you're still mourning.

I am.

I have a hard time mourning,

even more so when it's about people I love.

The only one who really was up to the standards of that world

as I conceived it, as I dreamt it,

was Gilles.

When I escaped from La Santé,

a few men almost died

before I went on vacation.

It's true.

What I say can sound harsh sometimes.

But that's who I was.

I remember one man in particular.

I went to a bar where he usually went.

I arrived by bike and left it outside.

I got off,

entered the bar and looked around.

He wasn't there.

If he had been, I would have gunned him down like a dog

just because he hadn't been up to my standards,

just because he hadn't owned up to what he owed me.

That's all.

It wasn't out of the blue.

In the past, I helped him get out of a very dire situation.

He didn't reciprocate.

Such examples

are deceptions.

I started to understand

that there was no fraternity.

He's moving, looking for smells.

Look, there's a fox moving.

Maybe it's a badger.

I'm discovering many things.

Before, it was almost duty that presided over my friendships.

There was almost always that notion of rules.

Today, it's different.

Today, they are real friendships.

There is nothing else than instinct or affinities.

There are no other backgrounds that stem from my past

like the fraternity of brothers in arms.

It's a very good discovery.

I am disabled when it comes to exchanging.

It's true.

I deprived myself of everything.

I deprived myself of what makes us human.

You've heard about Michel before, right?

Yes, since we were kids.

I told you on the phone.

You were at the train station and I had stolen a moped.

Mom said: "Talk to him, he knows all about it."

I remember.

It was weird to be on the phone with him.

I didn't really know who he was but I had heard about him.

I wouldn't say I was moved,

but it was weird to hear him talk.

I had never seen him before. His voice on the phone is cold.

He's quite cold when he talks.

Even when he's not in front of you,

you quickly get he means business.

He talked to me seriously and it was chilling.

Right now, I'd like to go to prison.

To see how it feels like.

You cannot get out whenever you want.

In movies, prison looks as if it is hell.

I know people who had been to prison.

They told me it wasn't that bad.

To do what he did, he must have been through a lot.

You really need to... How can I put it?

You shouldn't have anything holding you back.

Usually a family holds you back,

your father stops you like mine does.

When my father said 'Stop', he meant it.

I'd like to understand Michel, but I can't.

There must be things he saw he keeps to himself.

The things that led him

to do things on his own and do stuff that is normal to him.

We're about to be 18, to be adults.

We think about work, money, and family.

I think it wasn't the same for him.

From age 18 on, all he saw was jailbreaks and robberies.

What you experienced, we will never do in our entire lives.

You will do things I haven't experienced.

That's why we should share those things before you...

Then how do I share what you'll experience?

What bothers me the most is why, since he is normal now,

he didn't do it from the beginning?

- I know it'll anger you, but... - It doesn't.

We could talk about it together and I would keep it to myself.

As a youth, I don't want to do what you did.

There must be something in your head that encouraged you.

Where?

Thomas and you said there are things holding you back.

Yes.

I never said there were for me.

If you ever had a son or a nephew

who took the same path you did, what would you tell them?

Who am I to lecture them?

I think I'd say: "You punk, do it if you have the balls.

"You don't know the price you'll pay.

"If you don't have the balls until the end,

"you'll die with bitterness down your throat.

"Do it if that's what you want.

"But...

"You have no idea.

"This is not a movie."

A flight by helicopter ends in a banal robbery.

Michel Vaujour, who did the escape of the century five months ago

by breaking out of La Santé Prison,

fell yesterday in the middle of Paris.

The police had lost him for four months,

since his spectacular escape from prison.

A few seconds after attempting to force his way out of the bank

holding one hostage, the gunshots started.

Tonight, Vaujour, a bullet in the head,

is between life and death in intensive care

in a hospital in Paris.

I feel that in a weird way, you searched for it your whole life.

I think about it often.

I don't know if I was searching for it, but it found me.

I mean unconsciously, of course.

Maybe not my whole life.

It's the suicide I didn't commit

the day I realized the mess my life had become

before the time of loneliness.

I think that death

only happened as an initiatory process.

I think I always had it in me.

I saw glass shards pass me by, on my side.

At the same time,

there was a huge blow to my head.

From head to toe you...

I had been shot in the head!

I had gone to the very end.

I had failed because I was dying.

I didn't play the game well.

I must have failed.

Still, I didn't betray myself.

I heard a voice saying:

"Don't bother with him.

"He's already dead."

The feeling I had was that me, dying on the sidewalk,

was more alive than he had ever been.

I can't explain. It was...

It was like that.

Yes.

Do you remember what happened next?

I woke up in the hospital.

It was very unpleasant.

You weren't glad to be alive?

That's the understatement of the century.

Fuck, no.

You felt you had failed?

More than that. Absolute failure was to have survived.

When I woke up, I was filled with tubes.

I was paralyzed on one side.

It's hard to escape from your own body.

It's a problem.

Walls for several decades.

Prison.

And on top of that, a prisoner of my own body.

Back then, my wildest dream

was that one day I'd walk again with crutches.

It was my wildest dream when I gave it all.

There was no limit either.

How did your reeducate yourself?

I did what I would call some sort of inner journey.

I turned my consciousness upside down.

Your entire consciousness

takes you to the leg, to the foot.

You look for what you can perceive.

You start having some feeling.

A small muscle twitches.

From request to request,

as time, days, and hours pass by,

as weeks and months pass by,

or rather weeks,

there is some sort of reflex.

You reactivate.

You don't reactive there, because the muscle is not injured.

The wound is here, in the erased connections.

Bit by bit, I got my foot back.

I learned how to be human again by crawling on the floor.

I preciously kept all that was done to me

or the denial of humanity that was given to me.

To find the meaning and the strength I needed,

sometimes, often, always in my head,

sometimes and even often,

I pretended to hang myself.

It was the promise of a last exit.

It was the final exit, the final escape.

- And a choice? - Yes.

I had that freedom left.

I knew there was a possible end

that belonged to me and that nobody could take away from me.

You father died in 1986.

Did you miss not seeing him again?

Do I regret not seeing him again?

Yes.

It's horrible to say, but the reason I made peace with him

was that when he had cancer

he refused to keep on getting worse.

He asked to be helped in the end.

To me, it sort of "paid for"

the flaws I thought he had.

Maybe those were the interpretations of a child.

The man I have discovered since

looks like a nice guy.

For all those years, I had gone so far.

I had gone to another mental world.

It had nothing in common with normal perceptions.

The grave of my father

has been a bridge to me.

I felt it when I left.

When I left, I could feel I was more balanced.

I knew that this part of my life

would help me face things quietly,

those difficulties I would eventually encounter.

I felt as if I had been given a center of gravity.

That why I talk about getting back to my roots,

to a world I had forgotten.

Whenever Michel Vaujour is transferred,

the same forces are deployed.

The reason is always the same: the fear of an escape.

During the arraignment,

Vaujour, who at age 45

has already spent 21 years in prison,

never stopped staring at the ceiling,

as if exhausted by having to hear about his life in a courtroom,

as if despaired by the fact

that he could be sentenced to 30 years in prison

on top of the 17 years he still has to do.

NADINE AND MICHEL SPLIT IN 1991

Death was welcome then.

I was fighting to get my freedom back.

That's what I thought.

You cannot imagine how harsh it was.

It would scare me today. It scares me

when I thing about that time.

That was the man I was back then.

I was trying to save my own skin.

Nothing could distract me from it. I reasoned 24/7.

Alone.

My humanity could be summed up by a guy opening the door

to give you a plate of shit through bars.

Then he'd close the door.

All that was left was four walls.

You have time to think. All you can do is think.

Ideas and thoughts bounce back on the walls.

They come back and cross your mind. They're always the same.

Your brain cannot stop thinking.

Nothing distracts you from it.

You cannot distract yourself from it.

You're a prisoner. You're not even yourself anymore.

You're not even anything or anyone.

Consider the element of time.

Then you multiply it indefinitely.

There's nothing in between.

You'll see that you quickly stop resembling who you are.

- When you saw... - Jamila.

It was crazy.

- It must have been... - It was... No.

You cannot believe it.

I was in the promenade,

a small yard with fences everywhere.

I was wandering in my thoughts.

The guard who came told me: "Vaujour, social service."

I still remember it.

It could have not happened.

If it hadn't rained, maybe I wouldn't have gone there.

Her audacity was so...

She was working on her studies.

She had registered at GENEPI.

It is a body that allows some people

to teach to prisoners.

Nobody taught a prisoner like me, obviously.

Can you imagine the prison administration

caring about whether I'm taught?

Funny.

She wrote on a piece of paper by herself:

"Mr. Michel Vaujour, solitary confinement."

She arrived there, gave it to the guard who opened the door.

- It was that simple? - Yes.

There was the administration seal.

If you have a piece of paper, it means it's the truth.

It wasn't really true, but it was a good cause.

JAMILA TRIED TO RAISE PUBLIC AWARNESS

ABOUT MICHEL'S DETENTION CONDITIONS.

TO NO AVAIL

New hostage situation in a helicopter in Touraine.

Apparently, its goal was to help Michel Vaujour escape again.

The hostages were liberated and are safe.

Things went wrong

but the three criminals were identified.

One of his accomplices is once again a woman.

Her name is no longer Nadine, but Jamila.

She is a prison visitor who fell madly in love with him.

It's true Michel Vaujour's jailbreaks

are always surrounded by the same feelings.

What feelings?

Friendship, affection, and sometimes love.

Imagining Jamila in prison,

imagining that she could discover all that I knew,

that she could encounter all that

I encountered in prison...

The fragility I felt in her,

the fear she'd get broken like I got broken...

The fear

she'd lose what I lost there.

The fear she'd lose what made her

what she was for me.

Her innocence.

What I call innocence.

What allows me to go through life

with some faith in life.

What allows me to smile to people.

What allows me to breathe life in.

Michel, my love.

Since I arrived here, I haven't realized yet

even if during the first day, I went in front of the mirror

to strenuously word:

"I am in prison."

I feel I am living another life.

It's as if I imagined what confinement could be.

Now I know.

Don't worry about me, Michel.

I will endure.

I understand Stefan Zweig in his novel, 'Chess Story'.

It talks about this silence.

Michel, my love.

No, my love, I'm not suffering too much.

What you planted in me before this detention

helps me today to suffer through the hardships.

Yesterday,

the cellmate I had been for more than one month has been released.

Pain and profound joy

at the thought she will be with her children again.

I even get used to the vagaries of the prison world.

My love, my scald.

Yesterday, my brother came to the parlor.

He brought me the inevitable Christmas package.

What pleasure it was this morning to eat a mint at last.

I had been dreaming about it for three months.

I saw that she could face things.

She has a courage

that is very different from the courage of action.

I mean it's a continuity.

She is calm, serene. She has a strong soul.

She didn't hide.

She never renounced anything

even though she was given big opportunities to do it.

I remember something she said.

The judge asked her: "What's your connection to Mr. Vaujour?"

She answered that beyond the registers,

I was her family.

That I was her family then, and that I'd still be tomorrow.

Anyway, my case was unacceptable

and it would have to be revised one day.

When she said that

she knew it doomed her.

She had been released a few months prior.

It was conditional.

By saying that, she doomed herself. She knew it and I knew it.

Michel, my love.

I knew what was at stake in this trial.

We wanted to explain our longing for life.

We wanted to be done with being on the fringe.

You tried to say how much you suffered.

I tried to say what we wanted.

I hoped they would hear us.

The verdict was rendered.

My love, my scald. Please.

Don't be sad because of the sentence.

Know, love, that I'm with you in your loneliness.

Your emotions make me quiver.

The answers to the questions you ask out loud

are not fantasies.

I'm always here. I don't leave you.

You live inside of me absolutely.

I imagine, my love, that it must be hard to get your balance back.

You talk about death.

Please, my love, don't let those dark thoughts overcome you.

I respect and will always respect

your ideas and desires when it comes to death.

You know it, my love.

I cannot help but give you the hope I have inside of me.

Simply filtering the things that were hidden

in my exchanges with Jamila,

already revived

what I had killed before.

A woman of my world

would have necessarily confronted me with the values

of that same world.

But she opened me to new things.

It's what

surprised me.

How you can be someone normal

and have such a strong soul.

How?

That was it.

She remained herself.

She was true to herself.

She remained straight

without destroying anything

and without destroying herself.

What I hadn't been able to do.

AFTER 27 YEARS IN PRISON INCLUDING 17 YEARS OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT,

FIVE JAILBREAKS, THREE YEARS ON THE RUN,

MICHEL HAD HIS SENTENCE REDUCED BY 16 YEARS.

HE HAS BEEN FREE SINCE SEPTEMBER 2003

When we started to talk, you asked me where my sadness came from.

The kind of sadness you think you can see in me.

There is no sadness.

Somehow,

I don't know when or where,

I already died.

It's weird, right?

The emotions I experience,

be them pain or joy,

are through Jamila's eyes.

If she is joyful, I am joyful.

If she is in pain, I am in pain.

Today, what mark, in your mind and in your flesh,

did those 27 years in jail leave?

What won't you ever forget in your mind and in your flesh?

In my mind and in my flesh?

In my mind, the eyes of my wife

when we won,

when we knew we had a future.

In my flesh?

It's not in my flesh, it's in my heart.

It's the bullet in my head.

The experience that I cannot forget and that defines me

is the beauty of what was given to us.

That's all.

SUBTITLES: RED BEE MEDIA FRANCE